12. Given the circumstances, he should easily be able to justify to the public

why a NO vote is the correct vote, thereby taking the wind out of any campaign issue for McCain. Those folks that are solidly sold on the necessity of this FISA legislation for their "safety" are already voting for McCain anyway and would never be in the Obama court regardless of what he says. His planned vote in favor of FISA with or without telco immunity is a flat out mistake and will undoubtedly cost him some measure of support. I think from a political perspective, in the long run the losses will be far greater than any potential gain from this action. That's just MY gut feeling though.

But I wouldn't call it a Sista Soulja moment. He's just avoiding giving the right anything to attack with, same as Clinton has done her whole career, same as the Obama supporters condemned Clinton for, same as the Obama supporters swore he wouldn't do, same as us Clinton supporters assured the Obama supporters he would. But I'm not mad at Obama for doing it. Maybe I'm still bitter at the naivety of the Obama supporters, and maybe I'll always believe that the lesser candidate won. But, what the hey, he won, and now it's him or McCain, and that's an easy choice.

All Obama is doing is trying to fool the mainstream voters the way he fooled the "progressive" voters. Once he's elected, we'll start to see where he really stands. Hell, I doubt he even knows, yet.

6. I didn't realize you were basing positions on the merit of the position, only on the political

benefit derived from promoting that position.

So I take it you are in favor of doing away with the 4th amendment and the rule of law and see that as a good thing?

Or are you mixing apples with oranges here? I'm confused because you really haven't answered my first question, instead you answered a question i didn't ask.

My question wasn't whether yoyu thought the gas tax was a good idea or not.

My question was, since you claim Obama's stance on FISA is purely political (ie the right now can't claim that he failed to support the elimination of the 4th amendment and that he failed to attack the rule of law) why didn't he also take a concurrent position on the gas tax, so the right can't claim he doesn't support cutting taxes to the detriment of society?

9. I didn't answer your first question because it had nothing to do with what I said.

You said I seem to know what Obama was thinking, when my post seems to pretty clearly say that even Obama doesn't know what he's thinking. What he's doing is whatever he thnks will get him the most votes at that moment. He opposed the windfall profit tax/tax break because Clinton supported it, and he thought he could get more votes opposing it. He supported FISA because he thinks he gets more votes doing it. He backed Scalia's opinions on the SCOTUS because he thinks he can get more votes doing it.

You want my opinions on each issue? He was wrong to oppose the windfall profit tax, he was wrong on the death penalty for non-lethal crimes, he was wrong on the 2nd Amendment (although he cleverly made a statement which backed both sides), and he was wrong on FISA, though DUers are overreacting a little on that.

So what's your opinion on all these issues? Or do you just like to ask loaded questions without really considering the ammo? Are you backing Obama or attacking him, or do you just like attacking other posters?

18. Dems didn't stay home because of Clinton, they stayed because Congress turned on Clinton

They stayed home because of Sam Nunn and his gang. Clinton tried to overturn the ban on gays in the military. Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and lowered them on the poor. Clinton tried to pass health care. Clinton tried to appoint people like Lani Guinier, Kimba Wood, and Zoe Baird to his administration. And he was attacked at every turn by Democratic lawmakers, either because he was too liberal or not liberal enough or just because their voters believed all the crap about him.

Half the Democrats runing ran against Clinton in 94. The ones who turned on him lost, the ones who backed him won. Look at Ted Kennedy. He was trailing badly in the polls until he started embracing Clinton, then he won easily. Bob Krueger in Texas also ran against Clinton in a special election in 93, and lost by a landslide when Democrats refused to turn out for the vote. I worked in Austin politics that election, and heard over and over from Democrats that they wouldn't support Krueger because he didn't support Clinton. He may not have won anyway in Texas, but with only 8% turnout in a special election, if he had gotten just the Austin Democrats behind him he could have won.

The 94 purge was about a lot of things. It was about Dan Rostenkowski, it was about check kiting, it was about the Republicans being fired up by hatred of Clinton and a lot of the independents believing it. But the reason the Democrats stayed home wasn't NAFTA, it was because the party refused to back its own president.

I'll never forget working for former Senator Ralph Yarborough at the time, and listening to him discuss the Krueger election in 93. Yarborough was one of the most liberal populists to ever serve in the Senate. He was a true progressive, not one of these pseudo-progressives out there now. He was the kind of senator that Wellstone and Al Gore wanted to be like. We were talking about it, or rather, he was, and I was listening, because I had nothing to contribute and much to learn around him. He said something to the effect of "Krueger's running against Clinton and trying to pretend he's not a Democrat. Who does he think is going to vote for him, then?"

That's what happened in 94. The Republicans were motivated by hatred of Clinton, and the Democrats were motivated to stay home because their own candidates hated Clinton. I don't much like Obama, but I sure hope he gets more of a chance than Clinton did. Clinton was forced to the right after 94, not by Gingrich and the Republicans, but by the Democrats who refused to back him.

20. Clinton's problem with health care started when he kicked out the grass roots, congress, the care

providers, in fact everybody except the insurance industry dominated secret 500 people appointed by Hillary to her task force.

When the bill came up, with only 500 people who had been involved (and managed care wasn't much good anyway, extremely complicated and not understandable by most people) there wasn't anyone to defend it. Not the grass roots, not other law makers, not the care providers.

Clinton put all his eggs into passing george bush I NAFTA, and ignored health care. That didn't much excite the democratic base.

He was perceived as extremely weak after he made his first official act allowing gays to serve openly in the military, only to back peddle to "don't ask don't tell" which pissed off everybody including gays.

Dems voters in the South did stay home at a higher rate than in other parts of the country. But not just in Kruegars disctrict. All over the South.

so the revisionist claims that Clinton sided too much with insurance makes no sense. It was all those "Libby" commercials that turned the voters against it, and they turned their reps against it. If the reps had stood firm and tried to convince voters, rather than listening to the commercials, we'd have won it and kept Congress. If anything, Hillary's mistake was listening to too many sides, not too few.

NAFTA had little to do with anything. It was popular here in Texas, where it boosted the economy like gangbusters. Jim Hightower and Ross Perot whined about it, and both lost support in Texas for doing so.

22. I'm glad the country as a whole isn't Texas. Who was there to defend Clinton plan?

There was no grass roots. They were shut out from the start. So they didn't write and call their congress critters.

There was no congress people involved in crafting the plan. So they didn't have a stake in it.

There were insurance company people on the task force. They got to be there because they were invited by Hill to be there. Was that a smart move?

There weren't representatives of care providers, doctors groups, hospitals, etc. The plan was crafted in a vacuum, and 6 weeks of commercials and the absence of anybody else pushing back was all it took to sink what wasn't a very good plan any way.

You might be interested in reading this piece by the 1 (one out of 500) token single payer advocate added as an after though to Hillary's task force. It's quite informative, and he was actually there.

Obama, McCain, Clinton, and Kennedy. 15 voted no. Kennedy is sick, but the others were in DC, so what it means is that they didn't want to risk their bacon by supporting a filibuster. Personally I think he's wrong about the bacon.

Hm, how to put it....back when Clinton was running against Jesse Jackson, Clinton came out and heavily criticized rapper Souljah over her lyrics in a way many took as his way of re-affirming his whiteness so as not to scare away Southern voters as a far left liberal. More or less telling potential voters that he was not tied to the most extreme in the Dem party and would criticize them as extreme. Or so, that is how I took it.

I remember one cartoon, by I believe Oliphant, that had an image of Jesse Jackson and a bite taken out of his bare foot and from what I recall it was trying to state while Clinton would accept Jackson's support, he was also willing to take a bite out of him, too.

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